What’s New in GNOME 40 and Best New Features ?

GNOME 40 has quite a replacement numbering scheme. along side its New Look comes a replacement way of working. The old vertical metaphors are gone, replaced by horizontal theming and layouts. Let’s take a better look.

The Way of the GNOME

GNOME 40 was getting to be GNOME 3.40, but the developers decided to drop the main number and adopt the build number because the sole identifier. They were obviously within the mood for ringing the changes. GNOME 40 might still be GNOME at its core, but it’s not the GNOME you’re conversant in .

Some of the changes and new defaults might sound jarring. The GNOME team has thought carefully about all of them and has formed its opinions supported a core set of project principles. Tobias Bernard, one among the GNOME developers, says in his blog, “GNOME may be a very principled project.” By that, he means there are tons of principles and guidelines for developers to suits .

The GNOME developers aren’t locked into standard desktop norms and conventions. They’ll happily revisit any aspect of the desktop and run through it to unravel a drag . which may mean burrowing into the code and fixing the difficulty at its root, or it’d mean replacing that item with something new. There are not any sacred cows.

They’re also against providing too many options and preferences. This might sound to fly within the face of the Linux mantra of choice and adaptability . Tobias calls bent an earlier piece by Havoc Pennington, one among the first GNOME developers and chair of the GNOME Foundation board for its first two years. This describes GNOME’s “fewer preferences is better” principle. you would possibly find a number of the items that you simply want to vary are now fixed in situ .

The GNOME developers say the simplest thanks to enrich the GNOME ecosystem is by writing applications, not extensions. this point around, a number of the extensions that wont to work are broken by GNOME 40. tons of these extensions were created to exchange functionality that had been taken out of GNOME previously, or couldn’t be controlled directly through GNOME’s own settings.

I knew beforehand what many of the GNOME 40 changes were getting to be. that they had me worried. i exploit GNOME on my main computer, and therefore the “like it or lump it” attitude wasn’t selling me on the new GNOME way. But Fedora 34 is already shipping with GNOME 40, Manjaro is currently rolling out its GNOME 40 update, and Ubuntu 21.10 “Impish Idri” will feature GNOME 40. If you’re a GNOME user the juggernaut is coming. the simplest option is to approach it with an open mind and see if it suits your way of working.

The Major Changes

Dock Placement

The dock in GNOME 40 has moved to rock bottom of the screen. It wont to get on the left by default, but you’ll move it if you chose to. It might be set to auto-hide too. it might slide out of sight if the desktop real-estate was required by a window. it’s now been moved to rock bottom of the screen, without an choice to move it.

The dock isn’t permanently on-screen, so it doesn’t poach desktop space from you, but it does require an action from you to reveal it. which will be a mouse movement, a keyboard shortcut, or a gesture on a mousepad. That’s not as bad because it sounds. If you had the old dock set to auto-hide, you had to click on “Activities” in your top panel, press the “Super” key, or move your cursor to the left fringe of your monitor to form the dock reappear.

The difference in GNOME 40 is that you’re not just revealing the dock. to ascertain the dock you want to open the activities overview.

Activities Overview

The activities overview shows your workspaces, arranged horizontally, with the dock at rock bottom of the screen and therefore the search field at the highest . It’s the view you land in whenever you log in.

The pre-release builds of Ubuntu 21.10 still have the dock on the left. Whether Ubuntu’s developers shall buck the trend and go their own way, or fall in line before the launch date and drop the dock to rock bottom remains to be seen. It still sports the “Hirsute Hippo” wallpaper and lots of of the applications are still pre-GNOME 40 versions, so we’re definitely not watching the finished article here.

Pressing the Esc key, using the Super+Alt+Down Arrow combo, or clicking on a workspace returns you to your regular desktop.

If you’ve got an “Activities” option in your top panel, like Fedora and Ubuntu, click it to return to the activities overview. On distributions that don’t have an “Activities” option, the top-left corner of your screen acts as a hot corner. Pushing your mouse cursor into that corner opens the activities view. you’ll also press the Super key or use Super+Alt+Up Arrow. On a laptop with a touchpad, use a three-finger upward stroke.

To pan sideways through your workspaces use your scroll-wheel, the Super+Alt+Right Arrow and Super+Alt+Left Arrow keys, or a three-finger drag on the touchpad. These also work on the regular desktop, although mouse users got to hold down Super+Alt while using their scroll wheel.

Manjaro is sticking with its usual Super+PageUp and Super+PgDn to hop between workspaces on the desktop.

If you would like to launch several apps from the dock directly , Ctrl+Click them. If you single-click, the activities overview closes—along with the dock—and you’re returned to your desktop.

When you’ve been performing on your computer for a short time and withdraw into the activities overview, your open applications are arranged in order that they’re all visible and displayed on the workspace they’re running on. Each application window displays the icon of the appliance that launched it.

Clicking on an application closes the activities overview and returns you to the desktop. the appliance you clicked on becomes the present , focused, application.

Application Launcher

Clicking the “Application launcher” button on the dock or using the Super+Alt+Up Arrow keystrokes within the activities overview opens the appliance launcher.

Use the PgUp and PgDn keys or your scroll wheel to maneuver through the list of applications. They now slide in from the edges , following GNOME 40’s horizontal theming.

You can drag and drop the appliance icons to rearrange them to your preferences. you’ll also drag and drop an application icon onto one among the workspace previews to launch it thereon workspace.

You can drag applications from workspace to workspace too.

Cosmetic Tweaks

With the default theme, many items have a new look with rounded corners. The file browser version 40.1 has these touches added.

These small tweaks carry through to the activities overview and application launchers. the highest panel disappears once you enter either of those views, but the things on the highest panel are still displayed. for instance , the “Activities” option is housed in its own rounded “island.”

Launching an application that isn’t pinned to the dock adds its icon to the dock temporarily. A separator divides these icons from the pinned icons.

Application Changes

Some of the standard applications have been updated. Tab completion has been added to the location bar of the file browser.

You’ve always been ready to right-click within the column headings of the file list view and choose which columns to point out . Now there’s a column called “created,” allowing you to sort the files by their creation date. Moving a file to a location that already features a file of that name, prompts you to rename your file. the automated extraction of ZIP files can now deal with password-protected archives.

When you look for an area within the Maps application, it displays a panel of data pulled from Wikipedia.

In Settings, the Wi-Fi options are clearer, and the input source has been moved to “Keyboards” from “Region and Language.”

You can define a “compose” key that you can use with “compose combinations” to type special characters and symbols.

The Verdict After a Week

Despite years of motor memory , I got wont to the changes very quickly. i exploit a trackball, so making large, fast mouse movements is straightforward . you only spin the ball and momentum does the remainder . Sending the mouse hurtling to the highest corner to reveal the dock isn’t much different from sending it careering into the left-hand fringe of the screen.

The difference is that the dock wont to appear where you’d moved the cursor to. therefore the cursor was there waiting. With GNOME 40, to use the dock you’ve got to travel to the recent corner and are available all the way back to rock bottom of the screen.

Partly thanks to that long roundtrip and partly because I’m more keyboard-oriented, I hit the Super key more often than I visit the recent corner. On a laptop, it’s less of a problem . The three-finger upward gesture feels natural. I already use that on Chromebooks, so it’s a well-known action.

GNOME 40 is getting tons of pushback online, often from people that haven’t used it and are vowing to boycott it. After every week of real-world use, I feel reasonably settled in. I expect that in another week I’ll have stopped noticing the differences such a lot .

Has it made me more productive? Not that I’ve noticed. But it hasn’t slowed me down either. GNOME 40 is that the new normal, so provides it a good crack of the whip and that i think you’ll be surprised how quickly you adjust.

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